There are reports that the alleged shooter entered the theater through one of the emergency exits, tossed a grenade-like device into the theater which released a noxious gas, and opened fire. There are also reports that several of the shots exited the theater and wounded people in an adjacent theater at the multiplex. Many of the facts are still developing - and will be in flux over the next several days as the investigation into the shooting gets underway. Expect new information to come out...

Hot Air's Mary Katherine Ham notes in her post on the shooting just one example of the tragedy, highlighting that one of the victims, Jessica Ghawi, was present at last month's Toronto Eaton Centre Mall shooting in the mall's food court which killed 1 and injured several. Ghawi blogged about the incident, in particular the strong intuition that she felt to leave the area in the food court where the shooting started minutes later. As Mary Katherine writes...

God bless her and her family and friends. I hope she lived the hell out of life between June and now. Her Twitter bio— “You can find me in the TV studio, NHL arena/ locker room, on a plane, or writing. Southern. Sarcastic. Sass.Class.Crass. Grammar snob”— and this essay suggest she probably did. Praying for all the victims.

Our thoughts and prayers need to go out to all of the victims and their families.

It's stunning to think that this could happen to so many when all they did was attend the opening showings of a movie.

Unfortunately, there are those who see these tragedies as opportunities for their agenda....

"[T]here is nothing wrong with politicizing tragedy," the Time senior national correspondent wrote this morning, reacting to the Aurora movie theater shooting. "If advocates or experts or even politicians think their policy ideas can prevent the next Aurora—by preventing potential killers from obtaining guns, by making sure potential victims can carry guns, or by some other method—then by all means, now is the time to spread the word."

Can we all mourn a tragedy without some vapid callous left wing 'elite' pontificating on these tragedies as 'crisis that should not go to waste'?

I suppose not as it did not take long for the nimrods to start...

Just hours after the attack, ABC News' Brian Ross, appearing with the tedious political operative playing at journalist, George Stephanolpoulos on Good Morning America leaped to link the shooter to the Tea Party...

This is the same contemptible behavior that marked the rush by the progressive media 'elite' to link the shooter of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murderer of half a dozen people in Tuscon in January 2011 to the Tea Party / Conservative politics.

Even worse, ABC News then had to retract their claim as 'crack' reporter, Brian Ross, apparently had the wrong James Holmes....

“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”

Question - why, after an irresponsible gaffe like this, do either Brian Ross or George Snuffleopoulos still have a job?

Joining the White House with calls for increased gun control are the usual suspects of the hard left ranging from Michael Moore and Piers Morgan in entertainment to NYC's Chief Nanny, Michael Bloomberg.

These calls are quite ironic given the amount of silence these pinheads have regarding Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama Administration - Department of Justice program to walk weapons from the US to Mexican drug cartels in order to create a justification for 'common sense' gun control laws in the United States. This program, which is undergoing a full fledged cover-up by the Administration under the umbrella of 'executive privilege', resulted in the deaths of at least 400 Mexican nationals and 2 US Border Patrol agents.

Why is there no outrage over the obstruction of Congressional investigators, the punishment of ATF / DoJ whistleblowers, or the fact that there are those in the US government who embrace 'the ends justifies the means' to the point that political points are worth hundreds of deaths?

Strassel continues the story of Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho businessman who, last year, made a large political contribution to a group supporting GOP candidate Mitt Romney. An Obama campaign website last April sent a message to those who made or will make large donations to the President by calling out Mr. VanderSloot and 7 other private donors by name, occupation, and attacked them for having 'less than reputable' records.

Twelve days after that online attack, an investigator who was a recent employee of Senate Democrats, was found trying to unearth specifics around Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. On June 21, the Internal Revenue Service commenced an audit Mr. VanderSloot and his wife over their 2008 and 2009 tax returns, the first time ever the 63 year old businessman had been selected for an audit. Two weeks after that, Mr. VanderSloot received official notification that the Department of Labor was initiating an audi of his business (cattle ranch) under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers.

The spot shows a clip of Romney reading a verbatim Obama quote, then snarks: "The problem? That's not what [Obama] said." Twenty seconds later, the ad shows the clip of Obama saying precisely what his "truth team" just claimed he never said. They can try to spin that Obama didn't really mean what he said (we dealt with that point earlier), but to assert that he didn't say it at all must even make old hands Kremlin blush. He said it. It's in your own ad, guys. But by all means, please continue to explain that Obama didn't say what he plainly said and that Mitt Romney actually agrees with it, or something.

Though Republicans say the president was implying that business owners didn't build their businesses, Obama said he was just talking about roads and bridges.

In an interview with WCTV-TV in Tallahassee that aired Friday, Obama said: "What I said was together we build roads and we build bridges."

He added: "That's the point I've made millions of times, and by the way, that's a point Mr. Romney has made as well, so this is just a bogus issue."

That's not the explanation that initially came from the Obama campaign when it was first asked about the speech last Friday in Roanoke, Va.

Sorry, Mr. President, that is not putting the toothpaste back into the tube.

One of today's editorials in the Orange County Register (Orange County, California) calls the President on his statement - saying that this fits within the President's personal viewpoint and ideology - 'If You 'Didn't Build That', They Can Take It Away'...

The National Review's Rich Lowry captures the president's economic philosophy succinctly: "The Obama theory of entrepreneurship is that behind every successful businessman, there is a successful government. Everyone is helpless without the state, the great protector, builder and innovator. Everything is ultimately a collective enterprise."…What is indispensible in the American economy isn't government. Even roads and bridges can be built by without government. But government can't build roads and bridges without private peoples' money.

Private industry can flourish without government regulations, taxation and other interference. But government regulators and tax collectors can't even exist without private individuals and companies to regulate and tax.

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.

Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

“The president’s comments last week about success in America are very important because they show how he really feels about capitalism,” O’Reilly said. “If you listen to the anti-Obama forces on talk radio and cable TV, you will hear over and over again that the president is a socialist or a communist. ‘Talking Points’ has never bought that. It is far too simplistic. Instead, the president is a reluctant capitalist — a man who believes our economic system is stacked against the poor and working class and always has been.”

Barack Obama, at least at this point, is not calling for the state ownership of all property within the state. Lacking that call, the case can be made that Barack Obama is not a communist or even technically a socialist. But this is a narrow nuance, because Barack Obama embraces statist control and influence on all aspects of one's life. He is not trying to eliminate the private sector - but remove major elements from the private sector and place them in the hands of government. What he wants to leave in the private sector are private businesses and wealth from which he wants to use the taxation power of the government to facilitate the redistribution of wealth in the progressive model.

With this, he is far closer to the 'liberal fascist' definition assigned by Jonah Goldberg in his excellent book, 'Liberal Fascism'.

With any definition, it's clear what the President meant when he brazingly announced, 5 days before the 2008 Election, that he intended 'to fundamentally change the United States'.

Today in History

1881 – 5 years after the defeat of General George Custer at Little Bighorn, Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrenders to the US Army – which promised him and his followers amnesty. Pursued by the US Army after the 1876 victory over Custer, Sitting Bull and his followers escaped to Canada. With his people starving, Sitting Bull made the decision to return to the US and surrender.

1944 – Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt at his East Prussian Headquarters as a bomb, set by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, kills 4, but only slightly wounds the Nazi leader. Operation Valkyrie, the effort of the conspirators to seize control of the German government, was initiated, but failed as word of Hitler’s survival spread. Hitler’s vengeance on the conspirators was notorious – more than 7,000 Germans would be arrested, and over 5,000 would die via execution or suicide – including pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Field Marshall Erwin Rommel.

1948 – President Harry Truman institutes a peacetime draft during increasing tensions with the USSR. Measure is to restore the size / strength of the US Army which shrank from it’s WW2 strength to just 550,000 men.

1969 – American astronaut Neil Armstrong steps onto the surface of the moon – ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ – becoming the first human to walk on the moon.

About Me

I've been commenting on various blogs and subscription sites since early 2002 - adding my observations, thoughts, and musings on local, state, and national politics, national security, international relations, the economy, and other topics interest me. Until 2009, I was most active on LittleGreenFootballs before being driven off. Since then, I've been fighting idiotarians on BillOReilly.com and other sites...